For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived a nomadic life hunting for game and foraging for food.

Then several thousand years ago they stopped.

They began domesticating animals, started growing crops, and lived a sedentary lifestyle.

The question anthropologists have always asked is why.

Learn more about the rise of agriculture, aka the Neolithic Revolution, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. There's an argument to be made that the most important thing in human history was the transformation from being hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers.

When, where, and why this happened has been the subject of much debate.

However, almost everything we take for granted in our world today

is the direct or indirect result of the transition to agriculture.

Agriculture allowed for cities and civilization

which in turn allowed for the rise of writing, mathematics, and technology which

eventually led to the Industrial Revolution and you listening to this podcast right now. It's all a path that began

with the rise of agriculture. The first thing to know about the rise of

agriculture is that it wasn't a single event that occurred at a single point in time or even in a single place.

It occurred over thousands of years in different places and at different speeds.

There's much that we don't know, let's start with what we do know.

Humans have been eating grains in some limited amounts for at least 100,000 years.

At some point, probably by accident, people threw seeds on the ground at one of their

campsites and then found grain growing at that spot when they came back the next year.

Once they noticed it, it was possible to do it on purpose. They would throw seeds on the

soil and there would be plants later when they returned. The rise of agriculture wasn't

the same thing as the discovery of plant cultivation. Plant cultivation

had probably been known for thousands of years, it was just that no one structured

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